“JEALOUSY IS UNBECOMING, DARLING,” he bellows back, and sinks a second axe beside the first without looking.
By lunchtime, we have accumulated a quantity of stuffed animals that defies reason—a teetering, absurd menagerie of plush bears and lurid neon octopuses and one enormous unsettling frog that Riot has named, for reasons he refuses to explain, Geoffrey.
We are forced to hire a festival worker with a wagon to ferry our winnings. I have a giant pink rabbit slung over one shoulder. Lucien is carrying a stuffed shark with the grave dignity of a man transporting evidence.
It is, by any reasonable measure, the stupidest I have ever allowed myself to look in public, and I have not stopped grinning once.
The afternoon unspools into one ridiculous wonder after another.
We brave a haunted attraction—a rickety plywood horror house staffed by bored teenagers in rubber masks—and the sheer comedy of four hardened killers being politely startled by a kid in a ghoul costume undoes me entirely.
Riot compliments the teenager’s lunge technique.
Silas critiques the corpse makeup with professional disappointment and offers, sincerely, to consult.
We eat our way through the food stalls, sharing greasy paper trays of everything fried and skewered and impossible, Riot stealing bites off my plate as a matter of policy. Lucienpretending to disapprove of the sugar and then finishing my funnel cake himself.
We even pass a bake table where, to my private delight, a tray of suspiciously familiar banana-chocolate muffins is selling briskly, and I say nothing, and feel obscenely proud.
“Those are ours,” Silas whispers, scandalized and thrilled, clutching my arm. “Pretty Peony, strangers are eating our children.”
“That was the entire point of making them.”
“Yes, but I wasn’t emotionally prepared to witness it.” He watches a man take a bite with the wounded solemnity of a parent at a graduation, and I laugh so hard I have to lean on Riot to stay upright, and the laugh is real, helpless, ugly, and entirely without strategy—the kind of laugh I have not laughed since before I learned what the world does to soft things.
Then the Ferris wheel, because Silas insists, and the four of us cram into a swaying gondola built for fewer monsters than this, and as it lifts us slow into the gold afternoon the whole valley spreads out below—the bright chaos of the festival, the mossy arches, the green hills folding away toward mountains I now know stretch on and on past the edge of everything.
From up here, Arch Hollow looks almost like a postcard.
Almost like a place people choose. Almost like home.
At the very top the wheel pauses, the way they always do, leaving us suspended in the high gold light with the whole world hushed beneath us—and for a moment none of them say anything at all.
Riot’s hand is warm on my knee. Lucien’s shoulder is pressed to mine. Silas has gone quiet and soft, watching me watch the horizon.
Four of us in a little swinging box at the top of the sky, and not one of us reaching for a weapon or an exit or a plan.
Just the wind, and the view, and each other. I have plotted in war rooms and survived in cells and danced for my supper in rooms that wanted to devour me, and I would trade every one of those memories for this single suspended minute.
I did not know peace had a texture until I felt it sixty feet up, wedged between three men who would die before they let the gondola so much as wobble.
Somewhere in the long golden middle of that day, the strangest thing happens to me. For a few precious, weightless hours, none of us are what the world insists we are.
We are not patients, not killers, not the condemned, not Blackthorn’s carefully filed monsters.
We are simply four people at a festival, fighting over fried dough and winning ugly stuffed frogs and laughing until our faces hurt. The normalcy of it feels foreign on my skin, almost suspicious, like a borrowed coat that fits too well to trust.
There are moments—I catch them happening, one after another—where I am smiling and did not engineer it.
Where the smile simply arrives, unforced and unplanned, a thing my face does on its own without consulting the strategist. There are moments where I forget, entirely, that I am supposed to be calculating exits and reading threats and bracing for the inevitable betrayal. Moments where I am not protecting myself from anything at all.
For a woman who has spent every waking second of three plus years and a whole brutal life before that in a posture of defense, the experience of simply… forgetting to guard is so foreign it borders on vertigo.
I keep waiting to be punished for it.
The punishment doesn’t come.
The day just keeps being good.
